Category Archives: Game Chat

As you can probably work out from the title what this is going to be about, the beta for Battlefield 3 was released to the whole world of gamers today! As soon as I got home I started the download and waited patiently. I started downloading it for the Xbox and I know a lot of the Battlefield and PC elitists will be screaming right now. I pre-ordered it for the Xbox but I am having second thoughts and may cancel it. Still haven’t made a decision yet. I’m still currently downloading the PC beta but it is taking ages and is locked on 89.95%. I’m having second thoughts because I recently upgraded my PC because my old one was a hunk o’ crap. I didn’t upgrade to a ‘beastly’ machine but apparently I can run, not on ultra high settings though. That’s why I’m getting the beta on PC too so I can compare and see if it’s worth it.

Maybe it’s just me but Origin has basically been dead, I can only assume because of the masses of people trying to download it. Anyway, lets get to the good bit, the game. On the console you can play the Paris Metro map on Rush. I think on the PC you can play Conquest on Caspian Border but I haven’t played the PC version yet so everything that I’ll be talking about here will be from my experiences of maybe an hour playing on the 360. The game looks great, I know a lot of console players like me have been kind of worried that the console version will lose out on the best parts of the game. Obviously the PC graphics are better but it still looks nice, similar to Bad Company 2 but cleaner, the lighting effects in this game are amazing. There seems to be a lot of recoil on the guns, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, it feels more realistic and it’ll force people to burst fire and shoot a gun properly for once. I’m fed up of seeing Ken Burton holding down the trigger in another one of his videos (I still like Ken as a commentator). The map is very cool. It has open colourful areas then contrasts to a linear dark passage. The destroyed metro station is a great place for a fire fight. The M-COM stations are in great places, great places to defend yet not too good so the attackers can destroy the defenders.

I may post another article on Caspian Border and my eventual decision on which one to pre-order. If you haven’t downloaded the beta, go do it now.

When I first started out with the Soldier I didn’t enjoy it, I couldn’t get the rockets to hit anyone and I felt so slow. After a while and a little practise I came back to the Soldier and now the Soldier is one of my favourite classes. He is the second beefiest class and, just like every other class, has the potential to do massive damage. I’ve had some of my best matches with the Soldier, going on rampage and killing everyone I see.

Just like the Heavy, the Soldier is a great class to have a pocket medic with and to Übercharge. The Soldier has a wide range of launchers, some better than others in my opinion. My personal favourite at the moment is the Black Box. It generates 15 health for every hit you get on someone. The downside is that you get one less rocket. As long as you keep reloading you should be fine. Anyway, we’re not hear to talk about weapons, you can watch the Taking One for the Team Fortress 2 videos that I link in every Team Fortress 2 class post.

Lets get on to strategies. The soldier is an offensive class so it is great for rushing, creating and helping pushes and invading Engineer nests. What a Soldier isn’t so good at is capturing points. The rocket launchers explosive radius can be hazardous to your health and you can take a lot of unnecessary health. You could always take out your shotgun but sometimes that just isn’t good enough so try not to capture if you don’t have someone else that can help you out.

You are a slow class so you are very vulnerable to getting backstabbed by Spies. Turning around and firing a rocket can be a good way to take out a Spy quickly, it shouldn’t be too dangerous. Now on to something I am not very good at, rocket jumping. I can give an explanation but I couldn’t do it to save my life. The idea of rocket jumping is pretty self explanatory. Using your rocket to get your character to up to heights that couldn’t be achieved normally. To rocket jump you have to jump and shoot at the ground at the same time. To reach even further heights you crouch and jump and shoot a rocket. To change direction you can move, jump and rocket or you can angle the rocket away from yourself to minimise damage. I’m sure you can find a YouTube video describing and showing you that is a million times better than text.

One quick tip, the Equaliser is probably the best melee weapon because you can get away faster when you’re health is lower but only when you pull it out.

The Pyro is one of the best starter classes. The flamethrower can kill relatively easily. It is often said that the mantra of the Pyro is W+M1, which is so true. A newcomer to Team Fortress 2 can do alright with the Pyro with no strategy but with a strategy, the Pyro can be an essential class to any team.

So, down to the meat of the Pyro. His or her, we’re not sure unless there has been some news that I don’t know about, if so comment! His or her main strategy is, ambush. The Pyro’s flamethrower doesn’t have very good range yet it is very powerful. Using flanking routes, a little bit like the Scout can benefit your team immensely. Especially if you have the Backburner which gives you 100% crits if you flame your enemies back, it is extremely important to attack from behind, especially if you need to take down a Heavy.

A more supportive strategy is called spy checking. This is very important when protecting the objective or your Engineers nest. Spy checking involves you puffing or full on flaming your flamethrower in areas that are vulnerable to your team, for example a capture point, the intelligence in CTF, an Engineers nest or even spy checking around a Heavy and his pocket Medic to make sure they don’t get killed when making an important push.

These tips are more for fighting against other players and helping your team mates with your compression blast. The compression blast is a blast of compressed air that can either push enemies back, reflect rockets and other projectiles and extinguish team mates that are on fire. Pushing your enemies back can be extremely helpful, even if you die it’ll give time for other team mates to push the enemies back even more. It is most effective if you push a Medic away from his Heavy. The Backburner uses a lot of fuel when using the compression blast so use it wisely. Extinguishing your team mates is extremely important. I can’t even count the times I have ran circles around a Pyro to try and get his attention to put me out and I die. Extinguish team mates, it makes you more useful and you get points for it.

One last tip, if you are going head to head against a Pyro, keep your distance and get out your shotgun, unless attacking from behind and you have the Backburner or if you catch him off guard, burn him up. It is harder to burn a Pyro because of his/her protective suit.

The Scout is one of the hardest classes to master. In the right hands he can be a death machine and be a key part of a team. The scout runs very fast. This coupled with his shotgun which can only do extreme damage at close range make a great team. His pistol can be used at longer ranges when needed. The Scout captures points twice as fast, this makes killing a secondary task, the job of the Scout is to be on the objective at all times. This coupled with a Pyro would make a great objective couple.

The scout is also one of the weakest classes, at 125 Health he is very vulnerable to any hits he may take, especially if he gets hit by a crit, it’s very risky to go out and capture points. Use of different routes to flank the enemy will make you more successful in taking out enemies and then eventually capturing points. The Scout also has some good secondary items that replace the pistol, e.g. Milk will heal you and anyone that hits the enemy when they are drenched with the Milk. Crit-a-Cola gives your weapons crits for a limited time to cause some extra damage, maybe to help take down a Heavy. Bonk will make you invinsible for a short amount of time, the draw backs are that you cannot shoot, capture points or pick up intelligence. This can be useful for getting past sentries and enemies. Maybe not so much for CTF as engineers usually put their sentries in the intelligence room and by the time your Bonk runs out it’s probably too late.

In conclusion, as the Scout your primary goal is to capture points, attack weaker classes that you can take advantage of with your speed and double jump e.g. snipers and catching engineers out in the open without the protection of their sentries. If attacking other classes, flanking is the best option.

I’m a huge fan of Machinima and Machinima Respawn and they do a great job of posting content of video games that people want on YouTube. Recently Respawn have been posting gamebattle matches with some of my favourite commentators playing. I’ve always loved the idea of playing competitively in a team and watching those videos coupled with watching the Call of Community a couple of days ago has really got me wanting to play some competitive Call of Duty.

Not too long ago was I hating the idea of putting Black Ops in my disc tray and even buying MW3 but lately I find myself really enjoying Black Ops once again. Maybe just playing some scrims or just playing some games for fun would satisfy me. Just playing against actual organised human beings would be good enough. Even though I would love to start up a team with my friends most of my friends aren’t beasts are Call of Duty, one is beast, two are good objective players and I would consider myself to be all right, maybe not a beast, an inconsistent beast would be the best way to describe me. I guess I could start up a team but we would get raped!

If you’re on Xbox and you want to play, not even gamebattles then add me and message me, Gamertag in ‘About’.

I haven’t posted anything in a while so I thought I’d talk about something that is kind of important in games right now and will be later on this year. Lately I’ve been a lot more interested in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I bought the game when it first came out and I immediately fell in love, I played a lot of COD near the end of MW2 and pretty much played COD over Battlefield most of the time, only going back for a game or two. Now I’m back in and really excited for Battlefield 3 and not so excited for MW3.

For me it’s the gameplay, I do enjoy arena games like Halo and COD but I love the open battlefields and realistic gameplay that is showcased in Battlefield. I understand that games like COD may take more gun skill to drop opponents and complete objectives but in Battlefield you have to work together, I mean it’s like real war! You have to revive to keep ticket numbers up, give ammo, spot people etc. There are a lot of games that I want for example, L.A. Noire, Portal 2 and games that haven’t come out yet like Skyrim but I haven’t been feeling the same way about MW3. The engine has hardly been upgraded since COD4 and I’m not a graphics whore! But seriously, the Frostbite engine has was upgraded from Bad Company 1 to Bad Company 2 and now they are upgrading it again! That shows that DICE aren’t looking for a game to crap out every year whether it’s ready or not, they want to take their sweet time making a quality game. Who knows, with Sledgehammer helping Infinity Ward on the campaign and Raven Software takes care of the multiplayer, we could see a great experience in online gaming, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

I know it sounds like I’m crapping on the Call of Duty franchise which I am and not very subtly but I do love Call of Duty no matter how much it angers me sometimes. In fact I am getting into it a little more thanks to Machinima Respawn posting competitive gamebattle matches and the Call of Community which just passed really got my hyped up to play Call of Duty.

I’m not sure if I’ll get MW3 but I’m not going to say no straight away. I know if something sells why stop selling it but I hope Activision one day see that enough is enough and do something about the franchise.

My first Call of Duty game was World at War so I started when COD still ran with basic 3, 5 and 7 killstreaks. When MW2 if you sucked nut sack you were left watching kill cams over and over and over again. I wasn’t that great on World at War, I had mixed results in MW2 and I only started to get mostly consistent scores in Black Ops. MW2 was the beginning of the killstreaks, Infinity Ward finally released the potential of the real gamers in the community by allowing them to get killstreaks up to 25 kills. I was very inconsistent in MW2 so I pretty much ran the whole time with 3, 5 and 7. When Black Ops came out the made it so you couldn’t unlock killstreaks with other killstreaks e.g. you couldn’t use your Predator Missile to get a double and unlock your Harrier Strike. Personally I really like the new system, you can only unlock killstreaks with your gun, grenades, melee and equipment. It’s a lot more fair and it doesn’t create ridiculous amounts of death and destruction.

Black Ops might be the most balanced Call of Duty so far but it does have its slight problems. The randomised scoped shots with a sniper is extremely annoying and I don’t even quick scope. If you don’t know what that is, Treyarch made it so for a small amount of time when you first scope in your shot could go anywhere in the hip fire sights to bypass quick scoping. In my opinion they’ve made it more unrealistic. One thing that everyone hates, except for the douches who do this is, stacking up RC-XDs then spamming them, one after the other. I recently had a match where I got killed by the same guy with both his RC-XDs in a row. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get a kill with an RC-XD, maybe 80-90% of the time. Everyone has the period where you use RC-XDs and I pretty much got a kill with nearly every RC-XD I had. Obviously I came to my senses and put 8, 9 and 11 on. I hate RC-XDs and I know people are going to use them, especially low level players but it really annoys me when a prestige 15 player stacks up remote controlled cars filled with explosives and obliterates me on an 8 killstreak. With Hardline all a noob needs to do is get 2 kills! 2 kills! And for bad player who most likely isn’t getting high killstreaks and dying a lot is going to stack up loads of them and just mess the other team up!

Treyarch have done a pretty good job at making the game balanced and fair but if you can spam something so much it makes the player consider stopping playing the game then there is a serious problem. Make RC-XDs like a 5 killstreak or something! At least the stacking will stop a little bit. All I wish for in MW3 is that they keep the balanced game and increase the amount of killstreaks, if I’m having a good day I’ll get blackbird, chopper and dogs in most of my matches. I don’t usually go higher than a 15 killstreak but it would be nice to have the option. I hope Infinity Ward don’t go over the top with the killstreaks like in MW2, not only do they need to keep gun damage balanced but they need to keep the killstreaks balanced, in MW2 you could have Harriers and Pave Low absolutely raping everyone on the server. Another huge thing I would like to see is killstreaks only by weapons etc. If not it’s going to be death and destruction and that can be fun but not when it goes over the top. Keeping the COD currency would be nice, that was widely accepted in Black Ops and I would be pretty pissed off if it were to disappear. More guns would always be nice, especially submachine guns. Maybe it’s just me but most of the subs in Black Ops aren’t that great, the best are probably, AK47u, Mac 11, MPL, PM63 and the Kiparis, there are other good ones but those ones are the ones that are the most consistent for me.

Battlefield 3 will most likely blow MW3 out of the water because all CODs are the same even if MW3 learns from past mistakes. As long as they keep it balanced and fair and try not to underestimate killstreaks to avoid stacking and spamming then it’ll be a better version of the same game they’ve been making for the past 10 years or so.